Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

You might expect Charles Webb, the author of The Graduate, to be bitter, said William Georgiades in the Los Angeles Times. The 68-year-old California native is deep in debt, living in England in an old-age hostel, and still watching other people accumulate all the royalties for a story and a set of iconic characters he created more than 40 years ago. But Webb insists it doesn’t bother him that he received only $30,000 after his 1963 novel was turned into an American film classic. “I don’t think it would have been so nice to have a lot of money,” he says. Artists seem to him destined to either strike it rich or struggle mightily. “The penniless author,” he says, “has always been the stereotype that works for me.”

Yet a bid for quick cash might best explain why Webb has just come out with a slim sequel to The Graduate, said Stefan Beck in The New York Sun. Titled Home School, it reads at best like a “sorry” attempt to kick-start talk of a movie version. But don’t bet that Webb would spend that windfall only on his own comfort and security. He and his lifelong partner, a woman named Fred, could have used all of the $120,000 he earned a few years ago when his previous novel, New Cardiff, was turned into a Colin Firth film. Instead, Webb redirected $20,000 to an artist he knew. “When in doubt,” he says, “be down and out.”